Web 2.0: How High-Volume eBay Manages Its Storage

Becoming a trusted eBay supplier is not an easy task, according to Strong. "It takes a long time for a company to prove itself enough for us to use them," Strong said. "There is a great deal of testing that goes on before we selected a vendor, for anything."

The storage environment is modular in design, so to add incremental storage containers or servers is a merely difficult—but not daunting—exercise.

"However, we really hesitate to add new brands of software and hardware, if possible," Strong said. "Wed love to be in a position where everything appears homogenous, so that it minimizes the skill sets our engineers need."

eBay home-cooks some of its own software to use within its system—customized specifically for the online auction/sales environment and eBays unique business needs, Strong said.

eBays structure is, according to Strong:

• highly distributed
• the auction site is Java-based; the search infrastructure is written in C++
• have hundreds of developers, all working on the same code

To keep scaling with the growth of the business, Strong said eBay uses:

• Centralized Application Logging, a scalable platform for logging fine-grained application information
• Global billing: real-time integration with a third-party package
• Business event streams: a unifying technology for efficient and reliable message queues. Cookie-cutter patterns are used within the system for optimal user experience
• Reliable multicast infrastructure: allows for distributed analysis of massive amounts of data and keeps the companys growing search infrastructure up to date.

When it comes to handling all that traffic, Strong said the worlds time zones provide a kind of natural "load-balancer."

"When were busiest here in the U.S., thats generally when Europe [the second-largest region using eBay] is asleep—and vice versa," Strong said. "Although we have surges now and then, the natural divide between the two continents works well for us."

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